French left and right agree: ‘Non’ to austerity

Commentary: Stage set for ‘Super Sunday’ in Europe in 2 weeks

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The big surprise of the first round of the French presidential election on Sunday was the strong showing of the far-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen, even though her third-place finish did not get her into the May 6 runoff vote.

Le Pen, daughter of National Front co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, captured 17.9% of the first-round vote, higher than poll predictions of around 16% and even higher than her father’s record of 16.9% in 2002. Read our full coverage of the French vote.

Socialist François Hollande outscored President Nicolas Sarkozy, winning 28.6% of the vote to the incumbent’s 27.2%. Polls have given Hollande a wide margin of victory in the second round and instant polls after the first round affirmed that outlook.

Reuters

Francois Hollande is all smiles after winning the first round of the French presidential election.

The reason Hollande is favored is that only half the voters who supported Le Pen are expected to transfer their allegiance to Sarkozy in the runoff. Many will stay at home, and one-fifth to one-third, ironically, will vote for the left-wing Hollande primarily to get rid of Sarkozy.

But there’s more to it than that. Le Pen has called for France to leave the euro and to restore control of monetary policy to the French central bank. This nationalist rhetoric appeared to win out in the end against the left-wing appeals of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose surging poll numbers promised more than the 11.1% of the vote he actually won.

Le Pen’s strong showing came just as the refusal of Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right party in the Netherlands, to go along with the government’s planned austerity measures forced Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to resign and call for snap elections in the fall.

Le Pen damages Sarkozy's election chances

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Nicolas Sarkozy became the first incumbent French president to lose in the first round of voting but all eyes were on the Marine Le Pen and her far-right party's success with 18% of the vote. WSJ's Grainne McCarthy reports from Paris. Photo: Getty Images

These events have to be disturbing to the European leaders, notably German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who are relentlessly pushing economic austerity as the only solution to the crisis in the euro zone. Read more on Europe’s wild weekend.

The stage is now set for a Super Sunday of elections in Europe on May 6, with Greek national elections, the French presidential runoff, and the first of two key state elections in Germany taking place on that Sunday.

Greece’s two main parties, New Democracy and Pasok, are favored to win enough votes to form a coalition government. Both parties pay lip service to the austerity terms agreed to by Greece to secure a European Union bailout, but both have been promising tax cuts and spending plans that would make it virtually impossible for the country to meet those terms.

At the same time, Greek polls say that three-quarters of the public want to stay in the euro
EURUSD, +0.0000%
Their issue is not with the common currency but with the drastic austerity terms imposed by Germany.

In France, Hollande will need to court the National Front voters by, paradoxically, moving further to the left, away from the Sarkozy center committed to Merkel’s austerity policies. Sarkozy himself is completely boxed in by his longtime commitment to Merkel’s line.

Hollande was sounding these notes already in his victory speech Sunday evening. He said the first-round vote showed he must respond to the unrest and anger spawned by unemployment, declining purchasing power, and insecurity, and to “redirect Europe on the path of growth and employment.”

Given the collapse of her Free Democrat coalition partners, Merkel is pinning her hopes in next year’s national elections in Germany on the renewal of a grand coalition with the Social Democrats, like that which made her head of government from 2005 to 2009.

But elections on May 6 in the state of Schleswig-Holstein and, more importantly, on May 13 in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, could result in coalition governments between the Social Democrats and the left-wing Greens that would be a model for the federal government next year.

In short, European voters could be in the process of telling their politicians that they don’t like the austerity policies championed by Merkel and her crew, they don’t think they are working or can work, and they want something else.

Merkel is too canny a politician to be blind to all this. She cannot change course ahead of the May 13 election in NRW, but she should have more leeway afterwards, depending on the results of these various votes, to ease up on her hard-line policies if she wants to.

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